Sunday, September 30, 2012

Philadelphia, PA

Sunday Morning - It's 6:00am and I'm sitting in the Seattle airport on my way to Philadelphia, PA, for the Fall Internet2 Member Meeting. The event runs all day Monday through Wednesday but I am staying around for a several days to look around. The last time I was here, there was very little time for wandering around the city to see the historic sites. I really enjoy these meetings but the long airline trips is starting to get old. Especially those that leave in the middle of the night.

Sunday Evening - one of the real benefits of visiting cities in the lower 48 are the restaurant options. This evening, a few of us found a wonderful Indian restaurant located only a couple blocks from the hotel. It was a nice treat...

For this trip, I'm trying out a Logitech Bluetooth keyboard for my iPad. The keyboard is a bit smaller than a regular keyboard but is larger than the virtual keyboard plus has nice tactile feedback about like the Apple Bluetooth keyboard. The main benefit of this setup is the longer battery life compared to a laptop and the Verizon LTE connectivity. For those curious, I get about 22 mb/s download and 6 mb/s upload over LTE in the Seattle airport which is about 20 times faster than the airport wi-fi. Verizon is not yet available in Fairbanks but they allow you to purchase service on a month by month basis. The iPad is again showing itself to be more than simply a replacement for a laptop. I still have a laptop with me but I don't really expect to need it much during the week.

Monday Morning - The Verizon service also works well here in Philadelphia. Much better than the hotel wireless and is just as fast as the Internet2 wireless here at the meeting. During the general session with hundreds of folks in the same room (each individual with at least two devices accessing the wireless network), the Verizon networks performed very well.

Monday Evening - No photographs for today as I spent the last 12 hours in meetings. There was a lot of talk about their new 100Gb/s connectivity but Alaska has been left out....

Tuesday Afternoon - I thought that this was kind of cool. Using very low latency audio/video software, there was a performance between a live violinist and a remote cellist. Here is a blurb from the press release.

"Violinist Marjorie Bagley, from the University of North Carolina – Greensboro School of Music, Theatre and Dance, performed from Philadelphia with Cellist Cheng-Hou Lee at the Northern Illinois University School of Music outside of Chicago in DeKalb, Illinois."

Again? This is my first trip in quite a while, or at least that is what it feels like. I haven't been to Philadelphia since there was another Internet2 meeting here. And I was so worried about a high bandwidth multicast demonstration working between UPenn and the Univ. of Alaska working that I didn't get much opportunity to look around town. Yesterday, I wandered around the local area for a while and it's tiring to walk on concrete. I'll try and remember to take pictures....